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Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them.

We are watching industries crumble Wall Street firms disappear unemployment spike and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton’s or Abraham Lincoln’s?

There are few things in politics more annoying than the Right’s utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word ‘freedom’ that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty the noblest cause of them all.

When the entertainers of the Right aren’t declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates they’re pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug an exemplar of what they call ‘the Chicago way.’

Maybe that first gigantic deficit the Reaganites piled up was an accident just a combination of deluded ‘supply side’ tax cuts and a huge bag of good stuff for the Pentagon. But pretty quickly conservatives discovered that deficits when done correctly did something really cool: deficits defunded the Left.

As you watch the world crumble try taking your Armageddon with this sprinkling of irony: Over the last three decades business has got virtually everything it wanted and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it.

Selling public property is the true Chicago way. Had Mr. Obama not been elected president the nation’s business journals would be falling over one another to praise his city for its daring market-friendly innovations.